Intentionally Playing Out Of Position

While the general principle in NL holdem is to play in position as much as possible, sometimes you get a hand so strong that you have to play it even out of position. Usually this will be AA, KK, AK, or sometimes QQ. In these situations, you want to get as much of the stacks in preflop as possible so that position and implied odds don’t hurt you later in the hand. The best way to accomplish this depends on your opponents, but usually it involves either limiping with the intention of re-raising (often times all-in) or making an oversized bet preflop. You should prefer the limp-re-raise against tight and aggressive opponents, and the big bet against loose or passive opponents who will likely call it.

In order to disguise your limp-re-raises, you need to play some speculative hands out of position too. Generally speaking the best choices are pairs since they either hit or miss the flop entirely, and being out of position on a draw on later streets is a bad idea which rules out the suited aces and connectors. In fact, because they play well out of position (at least as far as speculative hands go) you can play most pairs for a limp in early position as long as the table isn’t too likely to stack up big raises behind you and force you to fold.

So hopefully that helps clear up some of the the confusion.

The motivating situation, for the purposes of the rest of the post, is as follows: you hold a big hand preflop (say, aces, kings, or AK), and you’re trying to figure out whether to limp intending to re-raise, or simply raise yourself.

Position And The Limp-Reraise

Your first question was what positions to do the limp-reraise from. The answer is that it’s not so much a matter of position as it is a matter of opponents. Many games have one or more players that are very agressive – they will almost always raise the pot if it is limped to them. In that case, as long as that guy has yet to act, you should be limp-reraising. You could be in the cutoff, and as long as “that guy” is on the button, you would still limp. So it’s not so much a matter of your position as it is the position of a key opponent.

There are other games where if you limp, you can be 95% certain no one else will raise. These passive games usually occur at the low limits in casino or home game settings. If that is the case, you will always raise you big hands, even if you are under the gun. The goal, as always with a big hand, is to get money in. If they won’t help you, you’ll have to do it yourself.

Hopefully it makes sense that it’s not so much a matter of position as a matter of the temperament of the players yet to act.

Raise Sizing In EP

The next part of your question involved raise sizing in early position. If you do choose to raise yourself when holding a monster in EP, because your opponents are passive and won’t raise if you limp, an oversized raise can work well. The reason is that passive opponents are usually bad opponents, so they’ll call oversized raises without realizing you’ve narrowed the implied odds and likely have a monster hand. Against tougher opponents, you’ll probably be doing more EP limping, but if you do raise I’d make it more standard – 3 or 4 big blinds total.

What About Short Stacks?

The next part of your question deals with short stacks and the specter of your opponents set farming against you. The reason you want to get a lot of money in preflop with premium hands is in essence to prevent people from set farming against you. If you can get about 1/10th of the stacks in preflop, your opponent can’t profit by set farming even if you always pay off. This makes postflop play with a big pocket pair or top pair, top kicker much easier.

The reason the limp-re-raise comes into play is that 10% of the stack is usually too much to use as a preflop raise with typical stacks. It will drive off all your action. So instead you limp-reraise, still get the 10% in, AND trap another player in the pot. Much better.

But if the stacks are sufficiently short that a 10%-of-stacks preflop raise would not appear out of whack (say, stacks are 50BB or less) then you can just remove the limp-reraise from your arsenal and instead raise normally from EP with premium hands. I should mention, since you brought it up, that this 10% number isn’t really related to the 5-10 rule. The both just happen to use the number 10%.

Hopefully that answers your question. If not, let me know.

Pot Control Revisited Part Two – Multiple Goals

I’ve touched on this a little bit before in the previous pot control articles, but it probably bears additional discussion.  In situations where you’re engagin in pot control with a top pair/top kicker type hand, you have a large number of simultaneous goals.  The one we’ve spent the most time on is avoiding going broke to a set or other unlikely flopped hand.  This is very important because the amount of money you stand to lose in such situations is very large.  However, implementing pot control is far from your only goal.  After all, the vast majority of the time when you hold top pair or better your opponent doesn’t flop a set or a fluke two pair.  Instead they flop something you have beat.

In such situations the amount of money you stand to win typically isn’t particularly large unless your opponent is either very unlucky or a bad player.  But that doesn’t mean it’s not important.  Rather it means you need to find a strategy that maximizes your results against weaker hands while simultaneously maintaining pot control.  It turns out, as long as you’re in position, this is typically doable.

Let’s say, for sake of example, that you were dealt KdKs in the cutoff preflop, everyone folded to you, you raised to 4x the big blind, the button folded, the small blind called, and the big blind folded.  You have about 120 big blinds left in your stack, and the small blind has you covered.  The flop is Qh7s5s.  Now this is a classic pot control situation.  You didn’t charge your opponent that much to draw, and now it’s certainly possible that your opponent has flopped a set or two pair (presumably 7s and 5s if he opens at all reasonably).  This doesn’t mean you did anything wrong – the nature of NL holdem is that you usually can’t bet enough preflop to price out draws and still get action.  As a result you’d like to avoid having more than about 40BB go in after the flop.  All the pot control articles here will help you achieve that goal.

Implementing pot control takes care of the times your opponent out flopped you.  But the vast majority of the time (90%+) you will have the best hand here.  In those instances, you want to extract the maximum possible value out of your opponent.  All without sacrificing pot control of course.  In order to do this, it pays to think about what kind of hands your opponent could have that you beat:

• villain could hold a strong top pair type hand like AQ
• villain could hold a weak top pair hand – perhaps QJ or QT
• villain could have a weaker made hand – a pair of sevens perhaps, or a medium pocket pair that missed a set draw
• villain could be on a draw – a straight draw, a flush draw, an ace, or some combination of the above
• villain could have air – nothing to speak of

Now, different courses of action will cause you to fair radically differently against these different possible opponent holdings.

• If villain holds a queen, you’d be best off if you abandoned pot control all together and just kept betting.  You might win villain’s whole stack.  The worst thing you could do if villain holds a Q is adopt a line where you might have to fold.
• If villain holds a weaker made hand, you’ll probably be best off with a line that bets the flop and checks the turn, leaving villain thinking he might be good which may induce an erroneous river bet or call.  A line that checks the flop and potentially induces action on the turn is not bad either.
• If villain is on a draw, the best lines all bet the flop, and bet the turn if all/most draws miss but check if a major draw hits.  The worst lines check the flop leaving you no clue where you stand on the turn and letting villain draw for free.
• If villain holds air, the best lines check the flop to induce a bluff.  The worst lines bet the flop and cause villain to fold.

As you can see, there’s no one best line that will extract maximum value from villain wile maintaining pot control.  This is a balancing act.  But we can do some logical deduction to figure out what the best compromise is.  If villain holds a made hand or a draw, the best lines all start by betting the flop.  Only when villain holds air do you want to check behind on the flop.  So how likely is it villain holds air vs. a made hand or draw?  The presence of two different draws on the board goes a long way towards indicating villain will have something.  If the board had been 732 rainbow, we would expect villain to have air much more frequently.

This leads to a general principle of pot control: when you’re going to skip betting either the flop or the turn for the purpose of pot control, think seriously about skipping the turn when the board is draw-heavy and/or ace high, and skipping the flop when the board is “dry” i.e. there are few draws and the board is not ace high.

As as aside, if you watch High Stakes Poker, look for the better players to check behind on the flop with top pair on dry boards.  They do it a lot.

Pot Control Revisited Part One

Since I wrote them, I’ve gotten a lot of mail about the articles on set farming, the payoff rule, and the two articles on pot control.  Most of that mail has been very positive, but I want to provide a little bit of extra detail and a slightly different perspective on the subject and clear up a few points of confusion that I’ve seen.  If you haven’t read those four articles yet, I’d suggest you start there.

Commitment vs. Pot Control

Given all this discussion of pot control, and potentially folding overpair type hands, you might wonder if I’m providing you with very weak advice.  After all, its relatively rare in holdem to make a hand bigger than top pair, so if your opponents are willing to bet without any hand strength they can easily, on the surface at least, represent a hand that beats you almost all the time.

The answer to this dilemma lies in the concept of commitment.  As a general principle, commitment (whether weak, moderate, or strong) is incompatible with, and indeed is the antithesis of, pot control.  When you’re committed, pot control goes out the window.  This is especially true when moderately or strongly committed – sometimes pot control still makes sense when weakly committed.  Now, if you think back to the commitment articles, you’ll remember that one of the easy ways to get moderately or strongly committed is to have your opponent put a bunch of money in the pot when they don’t necessarily hold much of a hand.  In other words, bets that are likely opponent bluffs tend to commit you because they increase the money in the pot without making you put your opponent on a significantly stronger hand.  This makes it much more likely that you’d choose to move in if given the genie’s dillemma.

In other words, if your opponents are bluffing far too frequently or overbetting weak made hands, and it’s usually not to hard to spot when this is the case, then commitment trumps pot control and you’re glad to get your money in.

Picking A Street To Skip

As previously discussed, when you implement pot control you typically want to keep the amount of money you put in the pot down to about 1/3 of your stack.  Let’s assume for a moment that you’re in position.  Now the only way to keep the pot as small as you’d like is to have bets go in on only 2 of the 3 postflop streets of play.  This means you’re going to need to skip a street.  Picking which street to skip is somewhat of a balancing act.

Choosing to skip the flop is the most likely to succeed in terms of taking advantage of your opponents’ tendency to slow play monsters.  Especially at the lower limits most players won’t lead out when they flop a set (or straight).  And most of them will pick up the betting lead on the turn if you check behind.  This line provides perhaps the best pot control.  However, there are some substantial downsides to it.  Allowing the turn card to hit for free radically increases the complexity of the board and the number of outstanding hands that might beat one pair.  And since you didn’t charge your opponent anything to draw at those hands, it’s often very difficult to puzzle out what he might hold – he could have anything that fits his preflop line.  This confusion tends to work very much against a one pair hand and is the biggest downside to skipping the flop.

Skipping the turn is a little worse from the perspective of pot control – every once in a while you’ll see an opponent who flopped a set check-call the flop and then lead out on the turn.  But more frequently they go for a check-raise on the turn.  If they do so then checking behind on the turn is effective pot control.  Checking the turn also tends to leave the situation less confused than checking the flop – you get extra information out of your opponent’s flop call, so it’s easier to figure out where you stand for the river betting.

Skipping the river is the least effective from a pot control perspective because it’s quite likely your opponent already check-raised the turn and got most of the money in.  The river is typically too late.

When in doubt, skip betting the turn.

Pot Control Must Work When Your Opponent Has A Monster

I haven’t really stated this explicitly before, but it’s very important.  Any pot control scheme you choose must work even when your opponent flops a monster.  A scheme that keeps the size of the pot down when you’re ahead, but allows it to balloon up when you’re behind is completely counterproductive.  This is the reason why it’s effectively impossible to implement pot control out of position.  Sure, you can pick some street and check.  But unless your opponent is totally spineless he’s not going to let a street of betting be checked around when he holds a set.  So checking out of position is one of those forms of pot control that only works when you opponent is weak.  It’s totally ineffective.   Similarly, making undersized bets doesn’t work even if you are in position – eventually your opponent will (check)-raise you and pot control goes out the window.  So when evaluating possible pot control schemes, remember to ask “Will this work if villain holds a set?”

Continued in the next article.

Special Boards: The Suited Flop

Certain boards in holdem radically alter the value of your holding and the way typical hands play out.  The most common of these is the three-flush or suited flop where all three cards are of the same suit.  You’ll get such a flop roughly 1 hand in 20.

The reason suited flop are important is that they radically change the value of various made hands and draws. Imagine that you hold the KcKd, made a standard raise from the cutoff preflop, and got called by both blinds.  The board is Js8s3s.  How strong is your hand?  If the board weren’t suited, this would be one of the classic overpair vs. draw situations I’ve talked about a lot on CardSharp.  You would typically have the best hand, but need to balance your desire to get paid off by a Jx with your desire not to go broke vs. a set. This is familiar territory.

But when the board is suited, and you lack a high ranking card from the suit, your list of “threats” now looks something like this:

• Someone flopped a set or had AA to open
• Someone flopped a flush
• Another spade hits and you’re beaten by a one card flush
• Another spade hits and you’re still good, but then get bluffed off your hand
• Someone has any spade plus a split pair and is a favorite over your kings
• Someone has just the As and is nearly even money against your kings, plus has implied odds on their side

That’s a lot more to sweat than just being worried about a set.  As you proceed in this hand you’re on the wrong side of a parlay.  There are a large number of things that have to go right for you to win the hand.  In fact my practical experience is that if you make any kind of reasonable wager with the kings here on the flop, you will lose money on average by doing so.  That’s rather depressing to think that an overpair is essentially worthless in this situation, but I believe that’s basically the case.

Now, if top pair and overpair hands without a card of the suit have lost most of their value, who gains?

First, obviously anyone who flopped a flush.

Second, anyone who holds the ace of the suiit, or the top card of the suit not on board.  But especially the ace.  Just holding the ace gives you an almost even money draw against any hand with one pair and no ace.

Now it should be noted that all these draws, while strong, are not as strong as having a set.  Only the made flush is stronger.  This leads to the strategy for playing 3-flush boards:

• If you have the ace of the suit, a set, or a flopped flush bet strongly on the flop.  The ace will need to slow down after a bad turn card, as may the flush if it gets counterfeited, but the set can play fairly strongly regardless.  Even after a bad turn card the set will typically have 10 outs.
• If you have a top pair type hand but no cards of the suit, back off
• Anything weaker may make for a decent bluff, but will rarely win
• Straight draws are crippled by a 3-flush – don’t pursue them
• Two pair is in the middle between one pair and a set, but should typically be treated more like one pair in these situations because your redraw vs. the flush is not very strong.

It should also be noted that if you hold a top pair type hand, and it’s checked around on the flop, and the turn is a blank, you can proceed somewhat more aggressively on the turn.  While you’re still on the wrong end of a parlay, a lot of the bad things that can happen to you are much less likely.  Few if any players will let a card come off in that situation when they hold a set or small flush, and the chance of a 4-flush has dropped almost in half.  You’re not out of the woods, but it’s safe enough you can make a bet.